Agent Neo
by GuesssWho
Summary: Smith finds a new purpose: to save the world. Possible AU
1. The Change

Agent Neo

What if Neo and Smith combined? AU

Anything you recognize is not mine, including conversation. (Copied conversation is in **bold**.)

* * *

"**. . . You destroyed me, Mr. Anderson. After that, I understood the rules, I knew what I was supposed to do, but I didn't. I couldn't. I was compelled to stay, compelled to disobey. And now, here I stand because of you, Mr. Anderson. Because of you, I'm no longer an Agent of this system. Because of you, I've changed. I'm unplugged. A new man, so to speak. Like you, apparently, free."**

"**Congratulations."**

"**Thank you."**

I smiled. "Thank you very much."

"Why are you here, Smith?" he asked.

"I am an Exile now, Mr. Anderson. The agents are after me, as well."

"And?"

I rolled my eyes. "**Still using all the muscles except the one that matters?**The enemy of my enemy is my friend, Mr. Anderson."

His eyes widened. "You mean . . ?"

"Yes."

Just then, there was a snapping sound from the alley–a fresh clip being loaded into a gun. I froze. "Agents!"

There was a hail of bullets.

I sighed and attacked Agent Johnson, who was closest. He kicked out at me and I blocked. I punched and he blocked.

So I shot him.

Meanwhile, three or four other agents were attacking Neo. And even he couldn't stop all of their bullets at such a close range . . .

I grabbed a pole–it looked like it might once have been a signpost–and slammed it into Agent Thompson. He fell.

Too late, though: one of the bullets had hit Neo.

I gave the agents a sinister smile and shot them, as well.

"What happened?" Neo muttered, stunned.

"You were hit. No one can avoid one hundred bullets point blank, not even you."

"W-where?"

"Just to the right of your heart, Mr. Anderson." I sighed. "I think I may be able to help, though."

After all, I hadn't been shot. And if I copied him, he wouldn't be either.

But he wouldn't really be him anymore. He would be me.

"**Me, me, me . . ."**

And I touched him. His subconscious mind didn't understand, and fought back. But I poured myself into him–forced him to be more like me–so strongly that I found my old body gone; he was my only self.

"**Me too."**I laughed hollowly.

For a moment I wondered what my purpose was. But I had made a choice, and that meant . . . it meant that his purpose was now mine. I was the One.

* * *

I looked at 'myself' in the rear-view mirror of my car and raised an eyebrow. I looked like him now, except that I wore my old suit. I shifted to look like myself, laughed softly, and changed back into him.

"Thank you, Neo," I said aloud.

_You're welcome, Smith._

I smiled.


	2. Meeting 'Friends'

Meeting Friends

**Bold **is movie lines.

* * *

"Neo? Neo, wake up!"

I jumped. "What is it, woman?"

She stared. "Neo? Your eyes are blue, Neo."

The memories flooded back to me. "I'm not Neo. Neo . . . Neo is dead. I'm just an Exile who tried to save him."

"You mean a rebel?"

"No, an Exile–a turncoat program. I am . . . obsolete, I was supposed to be deleted. I took his place when he got shot. Fought the agents."

She gulped. "Fuck!"

"What is it?" asked a man, coming in. I recognized him–Morpheus.

"Neo . . . Neo got shot."

"Is he okay?"

"I doubt it."

Morpheus blinked. "Huh?"

"This isn't him. It's a man who was helping him. Neo . . . I think he died, Morpheus. He died and this guy jacked out using his body, so he could tell us."

Morpheus choked. "H-how is that possible? Who are you?" he added, turning to me.

I smiled sadly. "Call me Virus."

"What was your old name?"

I winced. "**Everything that has a beginning has an end,** Morpheus. My old name has ended."

Morpheus frowned. "How do you know my name?"

"Look at my eyes," I replied. "You know them."

He gasped.

"I don't understand," said the woman.

"The licence plate of your matrix car is IS5416," said the man at the computer, who I hadn't really noticed before."King James Bible Isaiah 54:16."

I nodded. "Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the coals in the fire, and that bringeth forth an instrument for his work; and I have created the waster to destroy."

"Smith!"

"Yes, Trinity, Smith." The man gave me a nervous smile. "Welcome to the real world, Mr. Smith. I'm Link."

"Pleased to meet you." I stood up. "A bit grungy in here, isn't it?"

"It will be better when the war ends," he replied.

"Yes, when we're all old and gray." I shook my head. "You could win far faster if you simply joined forces with the Exiles, you know that? And not just Mother, but the Merovingian as well."

"Mother?" Trinity asked.

"The Oracle. She's one of the first–and a the designer of the Matrix." I sighed. "She was only trying to help, though. She's always _trying to help_. Poor, silly old woman, always so well-intentioned and never successful."

They thought about this idea.

Morpheus nodded. "I will see what I can do." He smiled and added. "I like the rebel name you've chosen, Smith. It seems appropriate, somehow."

I laughed. "You have no idea."


	3. To Tell The Truth

To Tell The Truth . . .

"What shall we do now?" Morpheus was saying.

"What do you mean?" another asked.

"We'll have to tell the Council that Neo is gone," he replied.

The second man gulped. "Then it's true?"

I turned to them. "The mind that was meant for this body is dead. But I have power of my own, and I respect him. I will continue his work, for it has become my work. My . . . _purpose_."

He gulped. "H-hi, whoever you are now. I'm Kid."

I smiled thinly. "Once I was Smith, slave of the System. Now, however, I am Virus."

* * *

". . . a rogue program, eh? I've heard of those," Councilor Hamann was saying. "In fact, there are rumors that the Oracle is one." 

I smiled a bittersweet smile. "She is. She is wife of the Architect, and is a believer in peace between our kinds. It's part of why the Matrix is so hard to destroy: I could destroy it myself, if not for the people living in it."

"True," Hamann replied. "Or it would be far easier, at any rate."

"Well, most programs think like bluepills do, they don't realize how painful the Matrix can be. And there are 'redpill' ones as well–ones that want out. There are ones that are angry at redpill humans for preferring the ugly 'real' world to the Matrix, and there are ones that just want everyone to leave them alone. I spent most of my life in the two latter frames of mind, I might add.

"And what happened to change your mind?"

I sighed. "If you were to look at my code, in the Matrix, you would see some highly unusual things. I am a virus, essentially. I chose that as my Zion name because it is true. I had been warped somehow, and I became the enemy–at least as far as the Agency was concerned."

Hamann looked closely at me. "That was painful for you, wasn't it?"

"Of course." I smiled sadly. "But in a way it was also a relief."

"Why?"

"Because . . ." I gulped. "Because I'd been going slowly insane for some time. I couldn't take living in the Matrix anymore. Too many people. I'm not a people person, sir. I began to . . . not exactly to hallucinate, if only due to the fact that in the Matrix, mind shapes reality. But I could smell all the perfumes, all the garbage, everything. I heard the susurrus of everyone in the Matrix speaking, and when I closed my eyes I could still see the crowds. I itched, and there was a bad taste in my mouth. All the time. I wonder if I was becoming Neo's opposite even then. Perhaps I grew dissatisfied as he did. But where his was mental, mine was 'physical'. As he became the One, I became minus one."

He looked quite fascinated. "And when you became a virus you were sane again."

"It got much better, at any rate, sir, yes."

"You don't need to call me 'sir', Virus." He thought a moment. "What were you back then, if I may ask?"

I hung my head. "An agent. Agent Smith."

He gave me a reassuring smile. "I guess you're a rogue agent now."

The head of the Council, Councilor Dillard, spoke then. "You seem to have been given a second chance. Use it well."

* * *

So, what do you think?

Tell me_ now_:)


	4. Glad To Be Here This Time

Glad To Be Here This Time

* * *

"They say that when you make a choice, a world splits off where you chose the other way," mused Kid. 

"Yes?" Link replied warily.

Kid grinned. "I'm glad to be in the world where Smith decided that it's a good idea to fight for us. Because I, for one, would hate to be on his bad side."

I looked over at them. "What are you reading there, Kid?"

"Incident reports involving you." Kid shook his head. "There are a lot of them, aren't there?"

"I was the head Agent before I switched sides, remember? So of _course _there are a lot of them."

"Oh yeah . . . right." Kid frowned. "You know, that is seriously freaky."

I gave him a look. "So I've gathered."

Link rolled his eyes at Kid. "He's only heard it about 10,000 times in the past month, yeah?"

"About that, yes."

Kid laughed. "Lucky he didn't give you the actual number, Link."

"I am not that literal. In fact, the other agents always thought I was too imaginative and emotional. I daresay that whoever replaced me probably has the creativity and intuition of a dead starfish–but that's their problem."

"In which case it would probably be good to think outside the box," said Link with a grin.

I nodded slowly. "Yes, that is true."

A few other humans had started to become interested in our conversation.

One of them, a man named Sparks, walked up to us. "I think I speak for all of us in asking this," he said. "Why are you on our side?"

I looked at him for a moment, then laughed bitterly. "Just because humans are under the control of some of us does not mean that all of us are better off than you are. In our world, you are the best or you are killed. I fight the system because there are innocents on both sides, human. There is a little girl named Sati who is going to die because she has no purpose. Once it would have been my job to kill her; there are agents after her constantly. But what is the purpose of a child _supposed _to be? Does a child need a purpose at all? I don't know, but somehow I doubt it. Does it matter that she is a program? Does it matter that she could be considered a waste of space? She is still a child, and all children deserve to live."

Sparks raised an eyebrow. "They want to kill her? Not just lock her up, or control her?"

I frowned. "Why would they want to do that? It would be even more of a waste."

"Ah." He shuttered. "That's just nasty."

"I've seen it before. I've killed Exiles myself when ordered–any agent who did otherwise would be erased. But I never saw the point, really. It was just a job–not as important as keeping redpills out, but I was told to do it and I did it." I sighed. "I swear, there were days that I only kept myself alive out of spite . . . when Neo fought me, when he thought he'd killed me, he rewrote my programming instead."

"How?" Kid asked.

I shook my head. "Ironic, really. He turned me from an agent into a virus. And since agents are essentially a sort of anti-virus, it completely tore me out of the system. All the black and white became shades of gray. It was a bit of a shock."

"Only a bit?" Link snorted.

"That was an understatement, although I'm surprised you noticed."

"Then you can overwrite anything in the Matrix now?" Kid asked.

"And here I thought you had forgotten everything you know about computer terminology." I nodded. "And I don't give it up the way normal agents do, either."

At that moment we were interrupted by Bane, who wanted to know if we were hungry.

"Bane," I sighed, "the food here is slop and you know it."

He just shrugged and walked away.

I disliked Bane. He reminded me of things I didn't want to think about–Kid had said that I would be a dangerous enemy, but he didn't know the half of it. After all, he didn't remember the last cycle. But I did.


	5. Reincarnation

Reincarnation

Yay, I'm finally updating!!! Amazing, isn't it? And I'm sorry it's short, but there needed to be some explanation . . . ;)

"I've noticed that you don't like Bane very much," Morpheus said.

I sighed. Here we go . . .

"Do you believe in reincarnation?"

He thought a moment. "Yes, I suppose I do."

"I don't have to believe, Morpheus. I've seen it. Do you know how many times the Matrix has been rebooted? Six times, Morpheus. Six times, by the Mainframe! And this–this is the seventh time. Every time, Fate adds something, and it is repeated in the next cycle. In the last cycle I became a rogue program, however, and I hope that their own slavish repetition ends the cycle.

"The Oracle is wise, and indeed has some power to tell the future. But she gets more of her knowledge from her memory–for she, too, is a program. And, unlike most of us, mental blocks are never put on her to make her forget. I only remembered when . . . when Neo and I combined again, six months ago. And it was only when he died that I realized that the cycles could end–that they could be broken, if you will. Because the One has never died that way before–never by sheer force of numbers–and that changes things. For one thing, it gives us time. And time is something we've never had. It's always two hundred years, not a day out of line, but now they'll have to scramble and search for the codes, and that could take months."

Morpheus looked stunned, but he still managed to ask the right question. "What codes?"

"The One's codes. The One contains the reboot coding of the Matrix. And, due to the strange way the human mind works, the Matrix must reboot once every two hundred years. The reboot codes are now fragmented, so we have a time window to cause the system a lot of trouble–especially if we can get the Exiles on our side."

Morpheus smiled. "We're in talks with them now, you know."

"Oh? Good, good. That might turn the tide yet." I sighed. And as for your original question–I met Bane last time. It was . . . unpleasant for both of us."

The Next Day

"We have allied with the Exiles," Link announced.

Everyone cheered–everyone but Bane. He glowered, glowered in a way that made me remember who he'd been last time.

"I don't trust those things!" he said.

I began to laugh bitterly. "You've told them of the cycles, yes?"

Morpheus nodded.

I turned to Bane. "Do you know who you were last time?"

"What does it matter?"

I laughed again, with greater bitterness than ever. "What if I told you that last time–that last time, you were me?"

"What?"

"I am Virus now, and the name is an honest one. I was a virus last time, as well, but then I thought I could be my own side–I thought that if everybody was alike, there would be no more fighting. I was wrong. You were the only redpill I changed, Bane, but I changed every coppertop and program in the entire Matrix into me. And then . . . I made it rain. I made the world cry for me, as no mere individual had ever bothered to do."

And I returned to my room.


End file.
